Summary: Captain Anderson Grant of the corporate starship Nexus boldly explores alien worlds (and occasionally the alien women, too). Grant and his crew struggle with the company’s version of manifest destiny, as well as its attempt to coerce them into military force. They begin to question whether the largest threat to their mission and their safety will come from outside the Nexus or from the company that respects them more for their genetic possibilities than their individuality.

Contains Mild Spoilers

Nexus is one of those difficult books to review. Mostly because I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s basically an R-rated Star Trek, if all of Star Trek’s jokes were about sex.

So here are the bad points.

It’s vulgar. Excessively so. Practically everything that comes out of the Captain’s mouth – who is *of course* our main character – is some sort of joke about sex or genitalia.

The Captain is almost textbook Mary Sue (Marty Stu) – in charge of the ship and unquestionable authority. The guys who dislike him are jerks, he’s a great fighter, and has a tragic past (which of course wasn’t his fault, but he still blames himself for it anyway.) He also makes so many sex related jokes that you get tired of him after a while, and its amazing that his crew hasn’t. And *of course* every female in his vicinity wants to sleep with him. Including aliens and the ship’s AI.

ALL the women want to sleep with him. Seriously, just once I want to see a story where all the women *don’t* want to sleep with the Captain. (I miss Firefly.)

There’s a lot of exposition. It’s interesting exposition – this alien species is like this, because of this, this, and this, but a whole lot of it nonetheless. Sometimes characters stop the Captain just to tell him their life stories – which of course he listens to, because he has nothing better to do.

Those things would have made me stop reading before I reached chapter three. Nothing is more annoying than a Mary Sue – male or female. So here’s the catch. I found myself enjoying this book.

The AI is incredibly funny and easily steals the show every time she’s on the page, the heads of division have their distinct personalities (despite the large cast) and are pretty ingenious, and the world building (literally so, because they’re looking for new worlds) is complex and fascinating, even if too sex-focused at times. Even the science is fun to read, if you like that sort of thing. (Which I do.) The author clearly did his research.

If you’re looking for a laugh, happen to like the Star Trek premise, and can handle all the vulgar jokes on every page, then by all means this book is for you. The sarcasm is biting, and I found myself laughing aloud at parts.

Overall: three stars.

There’s even a crazy military specialist in cryo-stasis who wants to take the Captain’s job. Sound familiar?